Lucy Worsley with re-enactors from The Second Pennsylvania Regiment of the Continental Line and the 43rd Regiment of Foot.
Photograph: Steven Mochrie/BBC Studios

Two years ago, Lucy Worsley delivered unto us the three-part series British History’s Biggest Fibs. She took us through the spin Henry VIII put on the Wars of the Roses and how Shakespeare took it and ran with it, helping to preserve big H’s not entirely unbiased account of it as one of the most attractive pieces in the national reliquary. She pointed out that the bloodless Glorious Revolution wasn’t so bloodless or glorious if you happened to be walking as a Scotsman or Irishman through the tumultuous year of 1688. She also showed us how the new, modern, caring ‘n’ sharing form of imperialism that created the Raj with loving Empress Vicky as the gentle polisher of the jewel in her crown … umm … wasn’t.

It was an opportune look, presented with customary brio by the historian, at the process of wish fulfilment, misdirection, confabulation and copper-bottomed lying that makes up an unknowable proportion of all the “facts” we think we have about the past and how it unfolded. Now – because, let’s face it, the time for programmes problematising national narratives and interrogating how they are wrought ain’t got any less ripe over the last 24 months – it is the turn of the United States.

In a move that will probably put her among the first up against the wall when Trump eventually finds the right combination of concrete slabs, metal slats and funding to build it, the first episode of American History’s Biggest Fibs investigated the traditional story Americans tell themselves about plucky colonial farmers unhooking George III’s greedy little tax fingers that were squeezing the life out of a land that yearned to be free in the American Revolution.

The standard version pitches it as a David and Goliath battle. Said plucky colonial farmers, armed with a musket apiece, set their faces against the professional British army and, with a little help from Paul Revere, General George Washington, God and Molly Pitcher, conquered it and brought about life, liberty (bells) and the pursuit of happiness for all, with a little time for high jinks in Boston Harbour along the way.

Unless you are currently wearing full Maga regalia beneath your Klan outfit, you will already know this is not quite how it went down. But Worsley drilled yet deeper, dispelling myths as she showed how they were constructed out of political and emotional needs, enshrined in art and perpetuated by both. E pluribus version of events, unum foundation story.

So Revere didn’t make his ride from Lexington to Concord alone, but had two companions. In fact he didn’t make it to Concord – one of the others did. But Henry Wadsworth Longfellow made him a lone (and successful) hero in his poem a century later and that’s the story that stuck. Similarly, there is no evidence the liberty bell rang out to summon Philadelphians to the town hall for the first public reading of the Declaration of Independence, but novelist George Lippard published a story in 1841 in which it did and so it has rung ever since. Molly Pitcher comes into being 50 years after she supposedly took up her husband’s sword on the battlefield, fragments of anecdote and memory gathered and embodied in one figure as witnesses passed away.

The Boston Tea Party was no picnic either, but part of several years’ violent struggle between colonial and British troops, with the perpetrators being condemned as criminals rather than hailed as hilarious pranksters.

Less whimsically and rather more of a factor in the construction of the American psyche and identity, the plucky farmers did not overwhelm the superior force with determination, grit and small arms. They allied with Britain’s great enemy, the French. Yes, dear GOPers – cheese-eating surrender monkeys helped George Washington to victory at Yorktown.

This is but to scratch the surface of all the information contained within the hour, for Worsley always puts together a dense package. She powers through it with her earnestness and academic training and rigour backing her up all the way. You have to pay attention, but the rewards are great when you do. Top marks!